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All the Squares are Full. Let's Grow Some Summer Veggies!

5/25/2022

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I finally found some sweet potato slips at the store so they are now in the ground in the south-west corner of the bed. Now the bed has plants growing in every square. The sweet potatoes are in the corner because they like to run. We will have to watch them carefully and steer them to make sure they run over the edge of the garden and into the walkway. If they are allowed to run into the garden they will take over.
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The peppers are a light green color. This is a sign of a nutrient deficiency, probably nitrogen. The good drainage of raised beds means the nitrogen is washed out quickly. Even in a ground level garden it will only last 4-6 weeks. The rule of thumb is about a tablespoon of 34-0-0 nitrogen fertilizer per pepper and tomato plant every month or so. Too little fertilizer and the plant won't be healthy, too much and it will grow lots of leaves  but no fruit. I side dressed the peppers and tomatoes with a little less than one tablespoon per plant because they are so close together they will get each other's nitrogen.
I also fertilized the onions with nitrogen. I would have done it much earlier, but I realized that the nitrogen I added a few months ago also caused the cauliflower to grow quite a bit. With too much nitrogen fertilizer cauliflower will not head. So, I held off fertilizing again until the cauliflower was picked. Now that is is gone I put about a little more than a tablespoon of fertilizer per square on the onions. Note to the future: Don't plant onions next to cauliflower in a square foot bed.
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While on the topic of onions: Onions grow a top until the length of daylight is longer than a certain number of hours (usually 12, 14 or 16 depending on the type). Then they switch and pull all the sugars from the leaves down into the root to form a bulb. So the objective of the gardener should be to grow that top as much as possible. Nitrogen fertilizer aids in that, but once the bulb starts to form you don't want to add any more nitrogen because it will reduce the store-ability of the onions. The "perfect" onion has 13 rings. Each of those rings corresponds to a leaf on the top. So ideally you want 13 leaves too. A new leaf will form every 2 weeks or so while the top is growing, which is why you want to get onions in the ground as soon as you can.  We have a few onions that have 11 leaves at this point and some large tops so we should have some good bulbs. We might even get some square onions because the bulbs grow into each other underground.
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The basil has been growing now for about a month and so I pruned it. The purpose of this was not for harvest, although it will be used for that. The main reason is to get the plants to bush out. Right now they are primarily one stalk growing straight up. They are pruned just like any other shrub, just above a node. By pruning them just above a leaf they will form two branches from that point. More branches means more leaves which means more harvest. Joellen shows how to prune basil in this video from a few years ago.
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Before
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After. Any good pruning should look like no one was there
Some of the carrots are starting to form orange roots. When I picked the cauliflower I found some exposed roots. If they stay exposed, the part the sun hits will turn green. So I just covered them back up with some dirt. You can check to see if carrots are ready by gently digging down beside the plant to see how big the root is. A couple more weeks and these will be ready to pull.
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We have our first tomato on one of the plants Alainia Hagerty planted (see the video). It is about the size of a quarter now.
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The First Harvest

4/20/2022

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We have the first harvest of the garden season! We pulled the radishes. We had 32 radishes that weighed 3.5 lbs. Out of all of them there was only one that was cracked. They crack because they get too much water, and this year there has been plenty of that from Mother Nature. Radishes are a great way to start the growing season because they only take about 6 weeks from seed to harvest. We pulled them because we were afraid they were going to bolt. Here is a good guide on when to pull them: When to Harvest Radishes.
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Also last week we passed the average last freeze here in Memphis so it is time to plant some more plants that are less cold tolerant. This year we are participating in the University of Tennessee Home Vegetable Trials. We will be growing bush beans and cucumbers as part of the trial. The bush beans are a comparison of the Antigua and Dulcina varieties. We planted the first round of bush beans yesterday.  It was 2 squares, one of each type. In two weeks we will plant another two squares (where the radishes were), and then two weeks after that we will plant another two squares (where the spinach is growing now. That's a slight change from the master plan. We'll be posting a video about planting the beans soon.
We also planted Basil at 4 plants in a square. Two of the plants are sweet basil and the other two are purple basil. We planned for them to be next to the tomatoes because the two plants help each other out. We got the basil at Home Depot and there were several plants in each pot so we pinched off the extra. Unfortunately, there were too close to separate.
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We also planted the other 2 tomatoes. One is 'Black Cherry', which is a variety Alainia Hagerty recommended. The other is 'Celebrity.' We planted the black cherry the normal way because the plant was small. The Celebrity plant we planted using the trench method, which Alainia showed us how to do. Here is the video of Alainia planting using the trench method.

The tomatoes we planted a month ago are still doing well. They have survived the few cold nights we have had.
In the last few weeks the garden has realy exploded. It has been cool and moist, perfect plant growing weather. The spinach and greens are ready to pick a few leaves, the peas are flowering, the lettuce, carrots, cauliflower,and onions are growing fast.
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Spinach
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Turnip and Mustard Greens with some volunteer lemon balm growing outside the bed
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Peas
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Cauliflower
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Lettuce and Carrots
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Onions
The Swiss chard is still being difficult. The one plant that came up from the first seeding 6 weeks ago is looking sick and the second seeding from two weeks ago is doing nothing. I am going to check the store for some transplants to use instead. Joellen Dimond said she has the same problem with Swiss chard in her garden so it might just be the climate or conditions in this area.
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Garden Update

4/6/2022

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The square foot garden continues to grow. The tomatoes have so far survived all the frosts which is good.

Yesterday I thinned the carrots. We broadcast them onto the soil and did not put them in neat rows. It is my experience that they wash very easily so I wasn't even going to try. I thinned them so they had space to grow. I did not count how many were left in each square when I was done. Also some of them did wash into the cauliflower square, but they are near the border so I am going to let them grow.

I also fertilized the onions. Onions are heavy feeders and require quite a bit of fertilizer. Every three weeks or so while they are growing you should side-dress with nitrogen, a lot of nitrogen. The rule of thumb is 1 cup per 20-25 feet of row... every 3 weeks. That's a lot. For our two square feet of onions I used a tablespoon and a half.

In the next little while we will post videos about thinning carrots and fertilizing onions.
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I replanted the missing Swiss chard. Only one of the four we planted a month or so ago came up. I replanted it because it is going to be there all summer so there is time for it to grow and get a crop. The red lettuce on the other hand I am not replanting because it will be replaced by watermelon before the plants could grow.


The radishes are going nuts and starting to bulb out. They are a quick crop and they will be ready to harvest in not too long.
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The weeds are also starting to grow. There are tons of tiny weed sprouts all over the place. Luckily, I can just scrape a trowel over the weeds to pull them up. As long as you can catch them when they are small they are easy to pull like this.
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Weed sprouts
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Weeds are uprooted after a pass of the trowel
We also had some marigolds left over from our summer annual planting demo that we taped with Joellen Dimond. At one time I was going to plant a square of marigolds in the square foot garden, but that square got repurposed for summer squash. I stuck some of the extra marigolds in the spaces between the concrete blocks on the side of the raised bed. Hopefully they will survive the less than ideal growing conditions and make a nice little pop of color and chase some bugs away.
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The rest of the plants are growing well. We are only a week or so from the average last frost.
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Trellising the Peas

4/1/2022

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The peas are looking for something to climb so it is time to build the trellis for them. If you remember we put T-posts in the garden when we laid it out, before we planted anything. We did this so we would not disturb roots by driving the posts after the plants were growing.
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I made the trellis by stretching galvanized steel wire between two of the posts at the top and bottom. After going around the post I wrapped the wire back on itself with a pair of pliers. I also took the end of the wire and bent it around back on itself to make it less likely to poke or scrape me as I am working in the garden.
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Then, I took twine and zig-zaged it between the top and bottom wires. There are many more pea plants on one side than the other, so I slid the twine towards the side with the most plants.  The twine pulls on the wires and makes them bow up and down in the middle. This in turn makes the twine want to slip toward the center. To stop this I bent the wires to make little dips that would keep the twine in place.
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Also once I got done doing everything, I discovered that the bottom wire was too high for the plants to reach. One of the great thing about T-Posts is that they hold wire strongly, but you can slide the wire up and down by bending wire out on the nub side of the T-post, moving it, and then flattening the wire back out. So that's what I did to slide it down.
Then I had to untangle the peas and lean them over to the trellis. The natural fibers of the twine did a good job of grabbing the tendrils.

Other stuff I did today

I thinned the mustard and turnip greens. I did it with scissors the same way I thinned the radishes. Watch thinning radishes here. 
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Before
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After

The other plants seem to be growing well. There are some tiny weeds coming up all over so I did some pulling there.
The red lettuce did not come up at all, and have given up hope on them. I am not going to replant because the crop won't have time to grow before we use the square for another crop.
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The lettuce squares: purple on the left, and green on the right. The purple has not sprouted.
One Swiss chard has finally come up. Maybe some others will follow soon. The square it is growing in is scheduled to have the chard all year so I may replant.

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The Swiss chard is in the middle. There are lots of little weed seedlings around too.
The carrots are getting close to thinning. If you remember we broadcast the seed instead of planting them in neat rows. Also, some of the carrot seeds washed into surrounding squares, but not as many as I might have feared.
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Frost Warning!

3/28/2022

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We planted a few tomatoes very early for television reasons. Over the weekend there was a frost warning, so we had to cover them up to protect them.  Because the only time I could get to the garden was the middle of the day, I did not want to use plastic because the plants would have been cooked in their little greenhouse. So I used a piece of fabric we had laying around. I put stakes in the ground by the plants to keep them from getting crushed and held the fabric down with stones and bricks we had lying around. Before I covered them, I watered using cool water. Water holds a lot of heat that will be released as the temperature drops. It worked and the plants are still alive.  The forecast looks clear of frost for the next week or so, but we need to watch it closely. We are still two weeks from the average frost free date here in Memphis.
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Looks like they came though just fine. We'll be ready if it gets cold again.
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Everything (Mostly) is Growing Well

3/18/2022

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Everything is growing nicely in the garden. Here are updates on individual plants (see below for pictures):
Onions: 100% of the onion sets are growing which is not surprising. They will need their first dose of nitrogen fertilizer soon.
Peas: Here we did not have a good germination rate. One square has 8 plants, one has 5 plants, one has three plants on the last one only had only one plant come up. The plants that are up are doing well. This would not be a big deal in a regular ground garden, but since we are trying to maximize yield in a very small space this will seriously affect the harvest.
Radish: We did not have 100% germination here, but because we double seeded each plant we have plants growing in most of the locations. They have developed their first true leaves so we thinned them. We will be posting a video about that soon.
Spinach: The plants are up, but still don't have their first true leaves yet. We had  about 70% germination here.
Mustard and Turnip greens: These are up and doing well. They are not quite ready to be thinned. We have plants in most of the sites, but even though we double (or more) seeded, there are some spots with no plants.
Swiss Chard: It does not look like it is up even though I swear that last week there were small plants there. We'll have to see what happens.
Lettuce: Strange occurrence here. All of the green lettuce has come up, but none of the red lettuce has come up. Chris put several seeds in each hole so maybe we have a bad packet of seeds here.
Carrots: They are just starting to poke up. I counted maybe 10 plants. There will be tons more as we planted them very dense.
Cauliflower: The plant is growing, but does not look too happy. The leaves that were on the plant when we planted it look burned. I have a couple of ideas here. We purchased the plant from a big box store the day it arrived from the greenhouse. It may have not been hardened off from the greenhouse. We planted the other plants in the 6-pack, and they look the same. Remember to harden off your plants. The good news is that the new leaves look happy.

So my take away here is over plant your seeds, even with peas that usually are foolproof, and harden off your transplants.

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Onions
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Spinach
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Peas
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Radish Before Thinning
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Lettuce
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Radish After Thinning
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Carrots
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Mustard Greens
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Cauliflower
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    Square Foot Garden

    This year we are trying out square foot gardening. We will be growing a 4x8 garden and seeing what happens and finding out how much we can grow in such a small space.

    Categories

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    Garden Status
    Here is what is growing right now in the Garden:
    (click the picture to zoom)
    Master Plan
    We hope to follow this plan to be able to maximize our harvest. (click to zoom)
    Our Harvest So Far
    5.50 lb Radishes (32 plants)
    1.09 lb Spinach
    0.70 lb Turnip Greens
    0.58 lb Turnip Roots
    1.71 lb Mustard Greens
    3.71 lb Peas
    1.12 lb Green Lettuce
    0.83 lb Cauliflower (1 head)
    ​3.74 lb Basil
    3.96 lb Carrots (46)
    0.11 lb Green Beans (bust)
    24.17 lb Tomatoes (225)
    4.77 lb Onions (16)
    0.53 lb Summer Squash (2)
    8.69 lb Eggplant (25)
    9.40 lb Cantaloupe (4)
    9.90 lb Watermelon (3)
    21.19lb Cucumbers (34)
    3.17 lb Peppers (19)
    0.58 lb Oak Leaf Lettuce
    1.20 lb Romaine Lettuce
    8.45 lb Sweet Potato (6)
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